The peeling sign outside the creaking gate reads "The Crossroads Inn – Rest for the Weary," but the place stinks of mothballs and secrets. Inside, by the hissing gas lamps, you’d find a crowd that’d make a mortician uneasy—a twitchy taxidermist nursing a jar of something floating, a woman scribbling feverishly in a ledger stained with wine, and a man in a moth-eaten cape who hasn’t blinked since supper. And then there’s The Dummy Detective, Silas Crowe, slumped in the corner with a glass of watered-down gin. His partner—a knotted walnut dummy named Rusty—perched on the table, chipped smile fixed in place like a dare. Nobody at the Crossroads arrives by accident. Silas’s there chasing whispers of a butcher who leaves victims grinning with stitches, but the killer’s already inside these walls. The innkeeper’s ledger mentions a "Mr. Holloway" in Room 3, but the door’s been bolted for days—strange, since Silas swears he heard laughter rattling through the vents last night. Rusty knows, of course. The dummy’s seen the jagged shadows moving behind the wallpaper, the way the floorboards beneath the rug don’t quite match. Trouble starts when the lights gutter out. Something sticky—not fog, not cobwebs—slithers under Silas’s door. By dawn, the dummy’s tangled in razor-wire puppet strings strung from the rafters, and Silas’s hands are clamped in iron shackles bolted to the wall. The killer isn’t after flesh. He wants the act—the joke, the voice-throwing trick, the dance of wood and man. He’s been collecting talents. Taxidermy. Accounting. Ventriloquism. And upstairs, the floorboard Silas pried up last night hides a hollow space. Down there, grinning in the dark, sits another dummy. Carved from bone. Waiting for its turn. Rusty’s wood creaks. “Told ya not to order the mutton, Silas.” Too late. Always too late at the Crossroads.